20.01.10
It was the last night of my first visit to China that I finally had the kind of conversation I was looking for. The funny thing is, I didn’t understand most of it.
Up until that point I’d met two types. The first type were academics at my mother’s institute, essentially her courtly subjects. These people addressed her only as Director (the Herr was silent). To them I was some addendum to genius, a spoiled American child with no mind for science. That’s an entirely accurate description of me, but nonetheless it’s quite a barrier to meaningful conversation. The second type were the locals accustomed to tourists. Very helpful if your intention was to see the most beautiful lakes or eat all the definitive Chinese dishes. Getting something real from them was like squeezing rock from a smiling coconut. And then some were in the Venn diagram of both types which made them like doubly impenetrable.
The single exception was my fast friend A____, the passionate socialist scholar. I’ve already written about him before. Yet from him it was the exact opposite problem. He was too cosmopolitan and fluent in multiple languages, too like-minded. I wanted a genuine foreign encounter.
So it was in that last night, after enduring hours of Chinese karaoke, that I got my big break. I had sung, reluctantly, a few American tunes. Mostly I was reticent, unhappy in this loud, bright room, and unwilling to don a friendly face with so many of my mother’s creatures about. My plan was to present as a stick in the mud so I would never be invited to such an event ever again. A____ arrived eventually, and for that I was grateful. He seemed to have a predilection for American songs by Elvis and Sinatra, a real 60s man. He gave every selection his very boldest despite being an offbeat, out of tune singer. Of course he did. Earnest gusto was just his way. Not a backward bone in his body, that one.
Only one, some kind of senior faculty member, matched him belt for belt. She also jumped in and sang chorus during any group songs. She even danced energetically during the ones she didn’t sing. I was a bit stunned at both her bestial stamina and her bright spirit. This woman was fifty-five. It just didn’t seem right to me, enjoying life at that age. Between her and A____ the night was taking on the kind of fun upbeat aura that I really hate to see. These two crooners! What could you do.
In any case, someone was with that woman. It was a younger woman of somewhere between twenty-two and thirty-four. I consider myself an exceptional judge of age, but I couldn’t get a better read than that. It was at once too dark and bright in that room, and I had sampled a bit too much of the unmarked liquor that was being passed around. My only deductions were that she had completed some sort of secondary education but had not yet passed the age of being considered “completely unmarriageable” (thirty five for Chinese women). Therefore, between twenty-two and thirty-four. After my conversation with her I raised the lower limit to twenty-six but could pinch it no further.
Remembering how tired I felt I’m a bit tempted to stop my record here. With the holidays coming up I know I’ll have to emotionally prepare for relatives. It would do to have something to fuel me through that. Still, I’ll probably regret not making a record.
It was raining but I opted to walk back rather than navigate through the waters of Chinese taxi companies. Besides, I couldn’t call one from my American phone and I certainly wasn’t going to ask one of these loons. A____ and his rival, in typical adventurous fashion, decided to walk as well. Only they were still hollering like a couple of wet cats so that left me trailing behind alongside this woman of indeterminate age. Well really she was more stuck with me than I with her. I’d refused to have fun the entire night. I felt pretty bad about it so as a sign of peace I put on my cap and held up an umbrella. And from there we embarked.
I soon sobered up as I realized the situation I was in. It was a heck of a long way back, wasn’t it? I cursed myself a bit for making a show of holding the umbrella up. If I were alone I would simply break into a run but it felt too late for that. I had escaped one hell for another.
The worst thing about it is that she had probably interpreted the umbrella holding as some sort of stupid courting gesture. If she was an institute employee this would put her in an awkward spot, as refusal would risk my mother’s ire (not really but she’d think that). By the way she was keeping her eyes cast downward and her generally demure manner it seemed I had committed exactly that error. I considered simply giving her the umbrella and walking away, but it seemed even ruder to abandon her in the middle of downtown. It also didn’t help that I had picked a rather large bulky umbrella. It would be downright comical to make her lug it around.
Normally in a situation like this I try talking. I have a sporadic talent for finding the perfect words when it comes to ameliorating one of a kind situations. In this case it seemed hopeless.
Still, I gave it a go. After a few minutes we realized that she could understand about half of what I said in English and I could understand about half of what she said in Chinese. I strained to recall every bit of Chinese I’d known from more than twenty-five years ago. Who even knew what she was working from. My mind was sprinting suicides back and forth trying to piece each side together.
If you know me at all then you know I absolutely love a situation like that. Now that’s fun!
I probably misunderstood a lot, but here are some interpretations. She isn’t from this city but had moved here from a place more than a hundred kilometers away. She visits her parents many times a year. Her work is in animal care. She is either a consultant or a contract worker for one of the labs at the institute. This is her seventh year on the job. She has a little brother who she adores, her junior by many years. She doesn’t know American music or film. She’s never tried one of those dating apps because there’s little hope of finding real connection. She’s never traveled, not even to see The Great Wall. She enjoys karaoke and everyone does. She doesn’t know why that woman is so incredibly happy tonight. Her favorite food is something. She likes a place called something. She does remember her dreams sometimes. In one of them, this something happened, and then that. Her friend says something to her all the time. Something interests her brother but not her. Something something something something. Many more somethings. Oh, the endless somethings, endless blanks forever empty! Especially the most important things, the abstract ideas, the cultural signposts, the personal touches. Something something something something. She had a something time tonight. It was very something.
How little it seems, written there. I suppose it couldn’t have been more than an hour. She asked me a lot of questions too, but I have no idea how much of my answers got through. Yet there was such genuine joy when we succeeded! We were passing notes as if by fox, hoping it wouldn’t eat half of it on the way. I knew I would probably never see her again, so each second passed like the last nubs of candle wax. What a strange walk, like a dream from an alternate dimension. One of those dreams you wake up from and you immediately want to get back to sleep, make it last a little longer.
I’ll have to do a better write up some day, do it real justice.
A conversation worth half having.
23.07.22
It was a conversation worth half writing about. Maybe I can fish for another half, saw a hole in the membrane and hook a bone or two.
I believe it’s been 1310 days since that half-conversation in mid December of 2019. I still think about it sometimes. If you have lived in the world during the year 2020 then you know that a few months after that half-moment in time people around the world began to get very sick, and by March of 2020 the WHO had declared a global pandemic due to the villain codenamed COVID-19. This was the five ton sarcophagus lid that sealed away any hopes I had of reconnecting with this veterinarian from China. I do hope she and her family got the softer end of it. I wish them well.
Amid such a haystack of tragedy it seems silly to lament the mouse’s whisker that were my hopes to untruncate this barely first page of a perhaps romance. Still, I have lived a life of first pages, and written a hard drive full of first pages. First pages are endemic in the life of a drifting soul.
“It was the last night of my first visit to China that I finally had the kind of conversation I was looking for. The funny thing is, I didn’t understand most of it.”
There is colloquial irony in finding something precious the moment before you must leave. You could argue it’s the leaving itself that imparts the preciousness. For all the good things you find in life, it’s the ones that get clipped short which tend to clump a stump in your throat. There is also colloquial irony in finding something dear the moment after you stop looking for it. Serendipity oft wreaths the idle. (The English word ‘irony’ is somewhat a contortionist these days. I have adorned it with the spandexic ‘colloquial’. In the Chinese way, I will trust in the reader’s understanding of context to meet me partway through each word.) So this moment was sandwiched by irony, or irony (pl.) were the two sticks by which it was chopped. It was a precious tofu cube of a moment. My wish is to escort it to an anonymous mouth.
I definitely went to China searching for something. My writing there had an agenda, so I ended up scrapping a lot of it. Was it too much of a reach to succinctly explain China to the rest of the world, to momentarily become the filament which could heat some miraculous bulb to such immense brightness that I could scour away China’s stubborn opacity, and bridge an everlasting camaraderie between it and the rest of the world? Well when I put it like that it does seem slightly ambitious. Still, I thought I could stumble upon some perfect moment, some choice situation that would lend itself to, if not a brightness, at least some measure of illumination, something which could dispel that shroud for a moment. The Chinese are different, but not so different. I wanted to say that, and I wanted to be able to say that, and not flatly.
Not to get too deep into it but. There is a divide of course, but it is not like some barricade that French revolutionaries could clog a rue with. The barricade is complex and everywhere, porous and as stubborn as a stain. And it exists not just between countries but within each person. Like my friend A____ who latched on to the songs of Sinatra, and coveted his experiences abroad in Europe. There is something in him which yearns for something else than what can be found in China. And many a Chinese person, I’m sure, takes something of what is foreign to them to fill the same void we all feel. Sometimes your language doesn’t have the word you’re looking for, the moment in a story that speaks to you. Not to say it exists or can be found. Once I heard this song in Taiwan being played live. I thought it was a cover and after returning home to America I tried to find the original. I never did, though I found a Stevie Wonder song (My Cherie Amour) which had a similar melody. I sang it all day to myself until finally accepting it was not the song and I would probably never find it. I was doing the memory a disservice by not accepting its loss. We are all cultural scavengers, patching shipwrecks with driftwood so we can finally chart a way off these islands. We want to connect. We can find a way, if only we had the time, life allowing.
Anyway I met this young woman on my voyage. I had been through a week of feeling out of place, walking around the clockwork machinery of China, taking in some of the local history. China is a bit like Europe in that it has historic places, and also historic places which were historic when those first places weren’t historic, and again, many times. You cannot help but feel humbled, I think, no matter your station. No wonder they place less value on intellectual property, don’t worship as much their outliers. Their storied heroes are all temperate, dutiful, exemplary rather than exceptional.
Anyway I met this young woman my last night there. I really had no idea who she was. And I want to say, I know it’s a big ask to “have a genuine foreign encounter,” to really connect with a stranger in a foreign country, like out of Before Sunrise. I have these desires, fully aware they aren’t reasonable desires, but I would sooner pluck out my eyes and make a pie of them before limiting myself only to reasonable desires. Don’t expect magic from life, but please do desire it. If we all resigned ourselves to reality we wouldn’t have art, only craft.
Anyway I met this young woman while it was raining. Lucky me, I happened to have an umbrella. It doesn’t take more than that to start a conversation sometimes. It’s strange to remember a conversation but none of its words. I remember her eyes meeting mine, at times, at times looking down. I remember the nearness at moments, the lightness of her arm. A dampness, a chill to the air, an ignorance of the neighborhood. Mostly I remember trying. Trying to cross this enormous distance to reach someone walking right next to me. No shared culture, nor memory, nor responsibility, I mean some pieces, small pieces to work with, but mostly just presence.
Yeah I met that young woman 1310 days ago. She’s very likely married by now. I can’t think of a reason why someone wouldn’t have married her by now. I had gone to a Chinese park earlier that week, to find flocks of old ladies placing what were essentially personal ads on boards and along lines. Papers with lists of credentials and physical characteristics, and zodiac signs, and probably a lot of things. These postings were of Chinese people my age or younger who were too busy working 70 hour weeks to find the time to date. She was close with her family, most are. They would have found her a good match. Her younger brother could be married soon too, come to think of it.
I didn’t quite meet that young woman, did I? Perhaps if I had studied Chinese harder as a young child. Perhaps if I had taken a different path in life here or there. Perhaps if I had known more so I could fill in the blanks better. I feel a hole there, a conversation I couldn’t complete, a connection I’ll never have. We were likely nowhere near a match, but it’s like a bingo machine that never settled. Who is she? Who could she have been to me? Was it even half a conversation? I don’t know if I can call it that. It was simply paying attention to someone and having them pay attention to you. And wanting them, and walking, and knowing it could never be.
Maybe in a way that does constitute half a conversation, the unspoken part. I suppose if I absolutely had to choose only half of a conversation to take with me and I could take nothing more, I would indeed choose to take it and this is the half I would choose. I guess I didn’t know that before.
A conversation worth half having. Still. With my precious tofu cube of a woman.
saltednotion 